Gmail

This page is showing a generic answer.
To see a more detailed answer customized for you, type your e-mail address here:

If you currently have an email mailbox on our servers, please use the box above to specify your email address. Doing so will make the instructions on this page easier to understand.

If you have a Gmail account, you can use it to read e-mail from your account on our servers. There are different ways to use your Gmail account:

If you only want to use Gmail to view a copy of each incoming message, you can simply forward your email to your Gmail account.

If you want Gmail to “know” that a certain incoming message came through your email address with us, allowing Gmail to keep it separate and optionally send replies from that address, you can also use the Gmail "mail fetcher" service to have your Gmail account pick up a copy of your email. (We recommend using this in addition to forwarding, because using both avoids delays where messages can take a while to appear in your Gmail mailbox.)

If you want to be able to send mail from your address using the Gmail interface, you can configure Gmail to send outgoing mail through our servers.

Forwarding messages to your Gmail account

If you set up your mail this way, you can’t test it by sending a message from your Gmail address to an address that forwards back to the same Gmail address. Gmail shows such test messages only in your Sent Mail, not your Inbox. See our “Gmail Discards Forwarded Messages” page for more details.

Configuring Gmail to fetch mail from your Inbox

If you do this without also adding forwarding, Gmail may not show the mail as soon as it arrives: there can be a substantial delay before they check for incoming messages and show them to you. To avoid this, use the forwarding method described above in addition to Gmail fetching.

We should also mention that if you also use another mail program (such as Outlook or Thunderbird) to read your mail using the POP protocol, you must tell that program to leave mail on the server after the program reads it. If you don't do that, the program may delete the messages before Gmail can read them. Before continuing, make sure that you've set all other mail programs you use to leave a copy of your email messages on the server for at least a short time (a day should be sufficient).

By the way, Gmail won’t fetch mail if you have more than 50,000 messages in your Inbox; they’ll show an error saying something like “Too many messages to download”. You can fix this by archiving some Inbox mail into folders.

Using Gmail to send messages

You can only send like this if you have a mailbox on our servers for the address. If an address is merely a forwarding address, you’ll need to also create a mailbox to be able to send from Gmail, even if you don’t ever read the mailbox contents.

Having trouble sending?

We’ve occasionally heard that customers who follow the instructions above see a message saying:

You must send through example.com SMTP servers when you send as example.com. However, this functionality is not available for your account. Please contact your domain administrator for more information.

If you see this message, it usually means that example.com or the Gmail account was previously connected to a G Suite (“Google Apps”) account that includes sending restrictions. The “domain administrator” they’re referring to is the administrator of that G Suite Google account, not us. (We can’t fix this for you — it’s a restriction Google has added on their end.)

Google should be able to help with this, but the short version of the solution is that the domain administrator should login at admin.google.com, then choose Apps > Google Apps > Gmail > Advanced Settings > Allow per-user outbound gateways. (However, Google sometimes changes where this setting is located, so you may need to hunt around for it.)